Fate Worse Than Death (18 page)

He walked down to the site of the bonfire. The private letters and papers that he had carried out of the house that morning had already been reduced to a smouldering heap. But paper in bulk burns slowly and incompletely, and some of the thicker items – account books, diaries, photographs – were charred rather than burnt. Tait made himself useful by fetching a garden fork from the shed and turning the papers over, lifting them so as to get enough air underneath to rekindle the flames.

‘What on earth are you doing?' demanded an authoritative female voice. He looked up from his task and saw his aunt's neighbour Mrs Braithwaite bearing down on him. She was wearing her summer lecturing ensemble, a floral dress and jacket in an unbecomingly shiny material, together with a pair of stout shoes. ‘What are you
doing
?' she repeated, the retaining chain on her spectacles swinging on either side of her cheeks with the vigour of her questioning.

Martin Tait felt that he'd had enough to put up with, during the past twenty-four hours, without being bothered by a stupid old bag like Mrs B. ‘As you see,' he said coldly, ‘I am having a bonfire.'

‘In this weather? What are you burning?' Marjorie Braithwaite peered at the revived fire. Then, with an exclamation of horror, she darted forward and snatched a half-burned hard-covered notebook that he had just lifted on the tines of his fork. ‘But it's my diary – this year's desk diary – the one I gave Constance at Christmas! What do you mean by burning this? Where
is
your aunt? Does she know what you're doing?'

Martin stirred the fire, hoping that the smoke would drive the wretched woman away. ‘No, I don't know where my aunt is,' he said through his teeth. ‘And no, she doesn't know that I'm doing this.'

‘Then how dare you? How
dare
you? Words fail me,' spluttered Marjorie, though this was audibly untrue. Tait let her go on protesting for some moments while he fed papers to the flames. When he could endure her company no longer, he turned to her with a cool smile.

‘Look, Mrs Braithwaite,' he said, recalling the effectiveness of Annabel Yardley's remark to him an hour earlier, ‘why don't you eff orf?'

He had almost completed the burning when his aunt returned from the Websdells'house. She looked very sad and tired, raw-nerved after doing what she could to comfort Beryl.

Con didn't at first see her nephew. The garden seemed to be swirling with black swifts and she stood for a few moments watching them wheeling and screaming as they trawled for insects in the gathering dusk. Her nephew called to her. She started, peered, then trudged down the long garden towards him.

‘Hope I've done the right thing, Aunt Con,' he said cheerfully. He explained that Mrs Braithwaite had taken exception to the burning of her gift. ‘I assumed that you wouldn't have put it on the bonfire in the first place if you'd wanted to keep it, but I thought I'd better salvage it in case you'd made a mistake. It really is this year's diary, and there are some entries in it.'

He offered her the charred remains of the
Healthy Living
yearbook. Con shrugged it away. ‘Yes, I did begin using it as an engagement diary, but I haven't bothered with it for weeks. It might as well be burned with the other rubbish. I'm sorry that Marjorie knows I've got rid of it, though – poor dear, she must be frightfully offended. What did she say?'

Martin told his aunt what Mrs Braithwaite had said to him. Then, after a moment's hesitation, he told his aunt exactly what he had said to Mrs Braithwaite.

‘Oh Martin – how could you? Poor Marjorie …' But Con's look of shocked surprise slowly gave way to a lop-sided, naughty grin. ‘I bet it did her a world of good,' she said. ‘I ought to have told her that myself, long ago.'

She went into her kitchen to forage for supper. Martin finished burning the diary, scraped through the ashes of the bonfire to make sure that nothing legible remained, and then followed his aunt.

‘How are the Websdells taking their daughter's death?' he asked.

Con told him. ‘What's particularly upsetting them at the moment,' she added, ‘is the fact that they can't make any plans for burying Sandra. The coroner's officer told them that it might be some time before her body can be released. Is that right, Martin?'

‘Yes – it's entirely at the discretion of the coroner, and he has first to satisfy himself as to how, when and why the girl died. No one can say how long that will take, so I'm afraid her parents will have to be patient.'

‘That's what they were told. But it does seem to make her death even harder for them to bear. The funeral service will be such a comfort, to Beryl in particular.'

Con finished assembling bread, cheddar cheese, lettuce and tomatoes, and a jar of Beryl's home-made chutney. She was too preoccupied with the Websdells'bereavement to think of apologizing to her nephew for the scratch meal. Martin went to the bathroom to wash away the bonfire smuts, and then joined his aunt at the kitchen table. She was still talking about funerals.

‘Our own church at Fodderstone isn't used any longer,' she said. ‘Such a pity – it was small and comforting, just right for a funeral service. When we want church services now we have to go to Horkey, and their church is a big, gloomy place. The windows are filled with some late-Victorian stained glass, all greenery-yallery, and I find it terribly depressing. Still, a great many of the Websdells' relatives and friends will want to go to Sandra's funeral service, so they'll need a large church to fit them all in.'

Her nephew, who was hungry, made polite sounds of agreement and got on with his supper. Con, who was not hungry, fiddled about with a lettuce leaf.

‘When I die, Martin,' she said abruptly, ‘I don 't want to be buried. I want to be cremated.'

Inspector Tait had recently been required to be present at an exhumation. Recalling it – the hair, the mould, the smell of putrescence – he put down his bread and cheese. ‘Me too,' he said, assuming that they were having a general conversation.

Con's narrow face flushed as she tried to make her nephew realize the purpose of her statement. ‘I'm telling you this because you're my nearest relative, and no doubt you'll find yourself having to arrange my funeral. I'm sorry to burden you with that, but it can't be helped. So I thought it best, while you're here, to say exactly what I want. Would it help if you took some notes?'

Con's wishes were for simplicity and the minimum of inconvenience to her family and friends. She would have liked, she told her nephew, a short service in Fodderstone church and the hymn ‘Dear Lord and Father of mankind, forgive our foolish ways'; but she specifically did not want a service at Horkey, not just because of the ugly stained glass but because she was convinced that only three or four people would attend. It would, she said, be embarrassing to think of a handful of people trying to sing a hymn in that great barn of a church.

And so she opted for a service in the crematorium chapel, with no attempt at a hymn at all, and no address. She wanted music, though. ‘I think they usually play taped music anyway, in crematorium chapels, and what I'd really like is the second half of the Fauré
Requiem
. Do you think that would be possible?'

‘I don't see why not,' said Martin. ‘Yes, certainly, I'll organize it.'

‘Thank you. And I particularly want the prayers to be taken from the book of Common Prayer. I may not be much of a churchgoer but I was baptized and confirmed in the Church of England, and the words of the old prayerbook are important to me. I don't suppose I always understand their meaning, but I know them by heart and they're a great comfort. After all, life and death
are
mysteries. A modern-language service offers no real explanation, and no comfort either.'

She fell silent, her thoughts far away. Martin waited, pen poised, for her to return.

‘Perhaps you'd better put notices in the
East Anglian Daily Times
and the
Daily Telegraph
,' she resumed briskly. ‘Just a plain statement of my demise, and the arrangements for the funeral. No need to say “Aunt of –” or anything like that. And be sure to put “no flowers”. Otherwise someone might feel obliged to send a wreath, and I always think that's a terrible waste. I'd much rather they gave the money to charity instead.'

Martin stopped writing. He looked up at his aunt. ‘To the Royal National Lifeboat Institution?' he asked in a carefully neutral voice.

‘Gosh no,' said Con promptly. ‘If anyone does want to make a donation in my memory, I'd rather it went to cancer research. The RNLI will be getting more than enough from me as it is.' She paused, realizing what she had said and to whom. ‘I mean – oh, crikey …'

Martin let her talk herself into an embarrassed silence. Then he said, in the same level voice, ‘You must do whatever is fair and right, Aunt Con.'

‘That's just what I want to do … only it's so difficult to know what
is
fair and right,' she lamented.

He smiled at her affectionately and reached across the table to press her hand. ‘I'll make you some coffee,' he said.

While they drank their coffee, Con returned to the subject of Sandra Websdell's death. ‘I'm so thankful you're here, Martin. If you hadn't been, I wouldn't have gone to the Horkey road cottage this morning – I probably wouldn't have gone there for days, and then it would have been on my own …' She shivered at the thought. ‘You've been such a help. I really am grateful.'

‘Always glad to help, you know that. Tell me, Aunt, what do you make of the girl's death? Who do you think was responsible?'

In common with the other inhabitants of Fodderstone, Con assumed that it was Desmond Flood. Martin explained that it could have been someone else. ‘That's why I asked for your opinion. After all, you've lived here for ten years. You must know most of the local people, and you're a good judge of character. If it wasn't Desmond Flood who abducted Sandra, who do you think it might have been?'

‘If it
wasn't
Desmond? Golly –' Con bit her lip as she tried to assimilate that possibility. ‘I really can't imagine who else would have done such a thing.'

‘Someone who's a bit of an odd man out in the community?' suggested Tait.

‘Ah well.' Con gave her lop-sided grin. ‘Fodderstone's an odd place – you said that yourself. Most of us are a bit eccentric, one way or another. It's perfectly ordinary people who are the exception round here.'

Her nephew murmured something diplomatic. ‘The man we're looking for,' he went on, ‘was probably very fond of Sandra. She might not have known that he loved her, but we think he did, in a rather peculiar way.'

‘Oh, that's different,' said Con immediately. ‘If you're talking about affection, it could have been –'

She stopped abruptly. ‘More coffee?' she asked.

‘Could have been who?'

His aunt said nothing more. Her colour high, her mouth tightly closed, she rose from the table and began to wash the supper dishes.

Tait stood up and gave her a lecture. It was, he said sternly, her duty as a citizen to tell the police all she knew.

‘That's just the point,' retorted Con. ‘I
know
nothing. I have absolutely no idea who was responsible for the poor child's death. Anything I say would be speculation, and I'm jolly well not going to offer you that.'

‘For God's sake, Aunt Con – you can't shield a murderer!'

‘Don't be silly, dear. Of course I'm not shielding a murderer – I don't believe for a moment that any of the village men would have harmed a hair of Sandra's head.'

‘But –'

‘I'm saying nothing more, Martin. What you must remember is that Fodderstone is my home. I'm a part of this community. We may be a bit isolated, a bit odd but the people here have given me as much friendship as I've ever known, and I wouldn't dream of tattling about what I suspect to be their private yearnings. Gosh, I've quite enough on my conscience without that … No, I'm not going to try to make things easy for you. You must do whatever you have to do without any help from me.'

Ordinarily, Tait would not have accepted such a refusal. Ordinarily, he would have pressured her until she told him what he wanted to know. But Constance Schultz wasn't an ordinary witness. She was his aunt, and the possessor of a fortune, and he wanted her money far more than he wanted her opinion on the Sandra Websdell case.

‘Of course,' he agreed, soothing away her annoyance. He picked up the tea-towel and began to dry the dishes for her. ‘Don't worry, Aunt Con, I will.'

The morning of Thursday 10 August was oppressively humid. The sun failed to appear at all, the sky was uniform light grey, the air tasted ready-breathed. Visibility was too poor for Martin Tait to go flying.

A mobile incident room manned by a uniformed police sergeant and a constable was now parked near the centre of the village. The prematurely balding constable, in a shirt that was already damp with sweat, was collating the statements that had been obtained by house-to-house enquiry. The combined population of Fodderstone and Fodderstone Green was so small that the enquiries had already been completed. Not one of the residents had provided information of any immediate significance, but without exception – and without being asked – they had expressed the opinion that Desmond Flood was the man responsible for Sandra Websdell's death.

‘It's what I expected,' said Chief Inspector Quantrill. He and Hilary Lloyd were in the caravan, reading through statements. Martin Tait was with them, having thought it essential to go and tell them that he wouldn't be able to continue his aerial search that day.

The caravan was a good deal pleasanter to work in than Quantrill remembered from previous summers, because the resourceful Sergeant Lloyd had brought with her an electric fan. Quantrill assumed that she had done this out of a proper womanly consideration for the comfort of her colleagues. In fact she had brought the fan in self-defence, knowing that in warm weather there always hung about the hard-working, balding PC Carpenter a miasma of sweaty socks.